This is even worse than I expected. And the "solutions" are the classic BULLSHIT they feed us - "privacy" by means of not giving the data to people who don't pay money for it! ARE YOU KIDDING ME?

In order for a car to be driveable:

(a) It must have NO GODDAMNED TRANSPONDERS OF ANY KIND. (b) It must have NO SATELLITE LOCATION TRACKING CAPABILITIES. (c) It must have NO BUGS LISTENING TO YOUR CONVERSATIONS. And so on!

I added (c) because hell, there has to be an "anonymized" set of voice recordings for downloading from the same crooked auto manufacturers that set up this spy data sale!

Any company involved in PROVIDING the data resold by Otonomo needs to be named, shamed, boycotted, and obliterated. Maybe I can scrounge up an old Yugo instead, made in a free country. Otonomo isn't the problem, they're practically Chelsea Manning here. The problem is the guy who tapes you in the shower, not the one who shows you what he found on the online forum.

the guy who tapes you in the shower

So the carmakers? According to the article you agree to this kind of surveillance whenever you buy a modern cars, that's fucked up.

On another note, I think the least lawmakers should do is come up with a very strict definition of what constitutes "anonymized data", since that's another expressions that gets used to justify this kind of stuff.

The only anonymous data is no data, but the government isn't going to help with that, so the only thing we can do is support companies that make the best products, like how the free market is supposed to work.

The fact that I prefer to use monero to move my funds doesn't imply that I wouldn't support laws mandating a more privacy-respecting way of making bank transfers. Even if I don't support companies marketing virtual assistants, I'm not immune to surveillance through Amazon devices.

Free market doesn't exist, the money always flow from the government, they get to decide who gets the bigger slice of the pie, and then cut a little space where people who don't know better can gamble their life away. Next time you are gonna tell me communism has nothing to do with the Soviet Union and maoist China, because that's not how it was supposed to work? These are ghosts from the past wich for some reason still haunt many people.

The state is evil, the market is evil, we must contain them both. When people will start to value real privacy, it will be too late. Right now Apple is plastering cities with commercials advertising the privacy granted by their phones, this is their main slogan: "privacy, that's iphone". After all these years, we are at this point, companies are selling the illusion of privacy, that's the kind of progress the market has brought us.

Who cares if people will start looking for real privacy, if when they'll do big companies will have already ammassed decades of data of any kind, do you think that won't be enough to control and debase billion of lives? It's not like they don't have enough already, they just need to get better at extracting value from it.

I said what would be the least we should expect, if you prefer to accept this state of affairs, until the masses won't start suddenly caring, I guess you are settling for even less than me.